Over the last few days, the Irish fringe history writer and radio host E. A. James Swagger had a number of high profile fringe history guests on his Capricorn Radio YouTube series. I don’t have time to listen to all of them, so today I have chosen two of this week’s interviews to write about: David Hatcher Childress, from December 29, and Scott F. Wolter, from yesterday. It was something of a slog to get through two solid hours of conspiracy theories, badly sourced claims, and wild speculation, but I made it.

David Hatcher Childress was on to talk about vimanas, Nan Madol, and Nazis, and even though it isn’t relevant I can’t help but note that Swagger misspoke and called Childress an “enema” before correcting it to “enigmatic.” He actually meant that Childress writes about mysteries, not that he is one. Childress is the kind of person who benefits from editing. In this radio interview he sighs a lot and sounds alternately out of breath and exasperated. It’s quite distracting. His stories are discursive and unfocused, and his monotone drawl is exaggerated the more he talks. Only when reciting what seem to be pre-digested talking points does he rise to a more dramatic intonation like he uses on Ancient Aliens, before sinking back into breathy quiet.

Childress discusses the city of Nan Madol in Micronesia and repeats more than once that 200 million tons of basalt were used to build it. The number, typically given (in Childress’s own books) as 250 million tons, is popular in fringe circles, but I don’t know that it’s true. Childress says that basalt, a magnetic stone, was used so that antigravity technology or magnets could be used to float the blocks into place, and he scoffs at claims that the “primitive islanders” could “somehow” quarry and move basalt by boat. Childress says that archaeologists don’t know where the basalt came from, but this isn’t true either. It was sourced to Temwen Island and Pohnpei in 2012. Childress is actually on to promote a second book he has written about vimanas, the flying chariots of Indian epic poetry. Childress, who makes this sound very boring, has based all of his claims on taking Sanskrit poetry at face value and interpreting what he himself identifies as stories that are “like science fiction” as science fact. Worse, he still accepts the twentieth century hoax Vaimānika Śāstra as a legitimate ancient source of Vedic wisdom and therefore concludes that vimanas were powered by mercury vortex engines. He knows that the text can’t be traced back before the early twentieth century, but he still claims (as he has done for years) that the book was secretly found in a library and dates back thousands of years. Following this, Childress claims that Area 51 contains a town called Mercury, Nevada, and that this was named for the engines of the vimanas, whose memory also was applied to the “Greek” (actually Roman) god Mercury. (The town, which does exist, used to be called Jackass Flats and was renamed for a nearby nineteenth century mercury mine.) He goes on to describe the mysteries of mercury (the metal) and assert that the Nazis built “swarms” of mercury-powered “foo fighters” during World War II to buzz Allied planes. Mercury, apparently, has the “well known effect in UFO lore” of shutting down electronic devices when placed in a spinning vortex engine. Childress becomes extremely excited in discussing the Nazis, whom he seems to hold in awe. He discusses their advanced technology and their ancient wisdom, and he asserts that at the end of the war, they got in their submarines and took off for a “secret base in Antarctica” as well as their bases in the Canary Islands and Greenland. Childress calls Antarctica “the last bastion of the Third Reich” and says that in 1947 a Navy flotilla and Admiral Byrd traveled to the Nazi base, where the Nazis defeated America with their flying saucers. There is no evidence of any of this; it derives from a recent attempt to find support for F. Amadeo Giannini's book The Worlds Beyond the Poles (1957), which presented dialogue from the movie The Lost Horizon as a message given by an alien to Byrd while he was visiting the hollow earth at the North Pole in February 1947. Not wanting to reject the ridiculous claims entirely, recent writers have revised this to the South Pole, where Byrd actually was in early 1947, and swapped out hollow earth beings for underground Nazis.

Childress claims that Byrd spoke of UFOs and Nazi bases to the press after the failure of the 1947 Operation Highjump, landing him in a mental asylum, but this isn’t quite true. He told the press that he was worried that the Soviet Union could fly planes undetected over the poles to reach America. And contrary to claims that he spent his life in an asylum, he returned to Antarctica in 1955 to set up America’s first permanent Antarctic base. Much of the Navy material about Operation Highjump was declassified and discussed in a scholarly article back in 2007, if anyone is interested in how badly Childress mangles this story. Childress believes that the U.S. government is making flying saucers but that regular Americans won’t benefit from advanced propulsion technologies because the “entire world economy is based on oil” so a major conspiracy is at work to keep us dependent on oil. Therefore, the military is keeping mercury-powered UFOs a secret to preserve the internal combustion engine and the economic power of oil. Contrary to his stance on Ancient Aliens, Childress now claims that UFOs are not alien spacecraft but rather human-made products of technology and physics. No one ever accused Childress of being consistent. He says whatever sells. Next, Swagger and Childress discuss ancient stone constructions, and Childress tells us that if we look at these stones we are in awe of how ancient people moved such large rocks. But, he says, there is no reason to think ancient people would have expended effort to build stone structures. That’s work, and ancient people were lazy. Instead, they only used big rocks because they could easily move them with antigravity technology. Childress further denies that the Inca built their own cities and fortresses, like Cuzco, Sacsayhuaman, and Machu Picchu. He claims that these structures are vastly older and the Inca, whom he sees as both ignorant and primitive (“they didn’t have the wheel, didn’t even have writing”), simply squatted in the ruins of better people’s works. This is despite the fact that the Spanish investigated their construction back in the 1500s. Here is Garcilaso de la Vega, himself half-Inca, describing how it was done: “they dragged them with stout ropes by the force of their arms” (trans. Clements Markham). So much for David Childress.

Two days later, Wolter announced on Capricorn Radio that he and Committee Films are hoping for a fourth season of America Unearthed, but he said that due to declining ratings for the H2 network and all cable TV as a whole (which he blamed on Netflix), the network is “reevaluating” its direction and whether to continue with the series past the conclusion of the current season. The fact that America Unearthed currently has only low-paying infomercial advertisers (the kind that have 1-800 numbers) willing to buy time rather than higher paying ads for cars and booze (the network’s targeted advertisers) does not bode well for the future of the series. Swagger asked Wolter about the so-called Stone of Destiny and whether the Ark of the Covenant had been hidden in Ireland. In recapitulating the story, Wolter shows that he still has not learned that the story is a medieval hoax since he continues to assert that he has concluded that “the legends were strong enough and credible enough” to suggest that the Ark was in Ireland. Wolter tells us that the point of his show isn’t to find artifacts but to “try to teach people about these legends,” which is a crock considering America Unearthed fails, at the most basic level, to understand the very legends it’s trying to investigate. In the case of the Stone of Destiny and Ark of the Covenant stories, the show completely failed to understand how those legends were fabricated in the High Middle Ages and then repackaged by a specific individual as part of the British Isrealism movement in the nineteenth century—as I wrote about before.

“It’s a lesson in life,” Wolter says in discussing why, Zen-like, the journey is more important than the goal. “Did we really think we were going to find the Ark of the Covenant? No, not really,” he said. Swagger, who is very proud to be Irish, wants to claim the Judaculla Stone for Ireland, suggesting that its patterns look like Irish megalithic designs. Even though Scott Wolter concluded that the stone was Cherokee on America Unearthed, in response he tells Swagger that Native Americans have told him that their ancestors met with people from Old World cultures “regularly” and therefore were using the same symbols as the Irish. “It really makes sense,” Wolter said. Wolter then explained that he hopes his show can help to contribute toward improved race relations. “You can’t tell the history of America without involving Native Americans,” Wolter said, just a few days after America Unearthedshowed him telling a Native American that the French “stole” America from the Welsh, who by virtue of a well-placed rock owned all the land on which Native Americans lived. Wolter and Swagger then discuss the role of individual personality in research, and Wolter explains that for him personal relationships and socialization are the most important criteria in doing research. People who are friendly and open to sharing, he implies, are good people, while those who are not friendly and are “territorial” in their research are bad people. Logically, this shouldn’t have anything to do with facts and evidence, but “that’s the way the world works,” Wolter says. This explains why Wolter is still defending Dr. Lee’s assertion to him that the 1602 Chinese map, signed and dated 1602, that he showed a couple of weeks ago was instead made around 1430. Dr. Lee is friendly and shares, so he must be right, even though he has no evidence whatsoever that the map predates 1602. (It is actually based on a 1570 map by the European cartographer Ortelius, which the Jesuit scholar who drew the Chinese map used as his source.) But that pales before Wolter’s most audacious misunderstanding of history and international law:

Maybe the government and the powers that be were worried that something like the [Kensington] Rune Stone could have opened up a can of worms where some other country could say, ‘Hey, we want to lay claim to this land,’ and it would have been a credible threat to the sovereignty of our country.

As I explained in the past, even if pre-Columbian America had been “owned” by the Welsh, their claims would have passed to England upon the annexation of Wales, and would have been terminated with the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which ended all the claims of the British Crown. Had America been “owned” by the Templars—well, it could not have been since they were not sovereign and had no legal standing to claim land in their name. (They could not coin money, either.) At any rate, with no European occupation, the land was terra nullius in European law, which did not recognize most Native American rights. Compare, for example, Joseph Trutch’s declaration in 1870 that because Native Americans (First Nations) rejected the idea of land ownership, British Columbia was therefore terra nullius and any and all land could be taken by white men—no special rocks or conspiracies needed. Crucially, no claims of prior Welsh ownership were advanced. (Trutch, a wild racist, called Native people the “ugliest and laziest” on earth.) The Kensington Rune Stone wasn’t discovered until 1898, decades after U.S. officials like New York Gov. Morgan Lewis were actively promoting the idea of a supposed Welsh colony in ancient America, so it seems highly doubtful that anyone would have been concerned about a “land claim” from the Middle Ages, especially one by powers that had no legal standing. Building off of this, Wolter decides to talk about Tartarian script, which he and Swagger both fail to understand beyond Hjalmar Holand’s misrepresentation of it, and Wolter follows Holand in concluding that the La Vérendrye rune stone was not written in “Tartarian” but “runes,” though which set of runes (there were many) he chooses not to say. He speculates that the Jesuits were purposely lying about the carvings being in Tartarian to cover up Templar land claims because the Jesuits were enemies of the Templars. Wolter says Tartarian is “identical” to runes in many respects, proving that he has no idea what Tartarian was supposed to be. Wolter asserts that Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin learned about Templar land claims to America from the secret societies of France to which they belonged, though he again fails to provide any evidence to support his assertion that we “know” the Templars had been in America since the twelfth century.

Some people hear this stuff and go, ‘It’s too fantastic to believe.’ Well, no, it’s not if you understand anything about how these secret societies work and about this political intrigue and the whole idea of land grabs, gold, silver, and how, you know… That’s what it was all about. So, to me, this isn’t a stretch at all. It’s just how it was done back then.

Wolter goes on to say that medieval people were constantly coming to America “in secret” for wood, fish, and fur, and purposely chose not to tell anyone to keep their source of materials safe. This should be easy enough to test by looking for American species in medieval European contexts, but Wolter doesn’t want to do that since there isn’t any American wood or fur in European materials before the start of the Columbian exchange. (This is barring the odd piece the Vikings may have returned from Vinland.) The longer he speaks, the more animated he becomes, and as the hour starts to draw to a close, Wolter is again upset at the academics and skeptics who try to “chop down” his work and any fringe claim that doesn’t fit the standard paradigm. “It’s disingenuous; it’s not honest,” he says. “If all you’re trying to do is come up with anything and everything to put down an idea,” he says, then you’re not contributing to a productive discourse, by which he seems to mean agreement with him. Later, he complains about “stodgy old Egyptologists” who refused to accept Robert Schoch’s work on the Great Sphinx. Wolter and Schoch met each other recently, with fringe history’s two highest profile geologists having a meeting of the minds over the way mainstream academia refuses to accept their evidence. “People will go to great lengths to protect their belief systems, which are really dogma, religious dogma. It’s not science.”In promoting his work near the end of the show, Wolter misstates his own blog’s URL, which I will link to in order to help him out, and claims that he does not censor any comments left there.

SW doesn't censer any comments there. Well except that one of his own he deleted. Which judging by some of his character attacks, telling some they are living in basements, hiding behind keyboards, etc, must have been extreme for him to rethink it to the point of deletion.

I think he realizes that he's on the outside looking in and that his data being dismissed regularly along with his conclusions based on hunches and educated guesses, (I would love to see a transcript of all shows with all assumptions pulled out and concastinated) puts him in a position of not facts but rhetoric and assertions.

I was explaining all this to my wife and she has never watched his show so she didn't understand the problems with what he was saying. I told her try this experiment. Take two cups of water and put them in different locations and measure evaporation rates, collect data, write a report and then defend your conclusions based on your data. Now make up a ghost story using a couple facts to make it more real, write it out, get a ghost hunter to walk around with a meter, and then defend your ghost story as real. If you do those two things you will see a fundamental difference in argument style. The first will be on facts and data and math, etc. The second will be on how good of a debater you are and how quickly you form and frame an argument.

I think that's why SW gets so mad all the time.

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Decimus

12/31/2014 04:11:47 am

Every time I watch or read about Scott Wolter's idea of land claims I'm reminded of that annoying esurance commercial. "That's not how this works! That's not how any of this works!"

So what if there were existing land claims? Spain claimed all the Americas based on Papal approval (I've forgotten the treaty name just now). Nobody but Portugal accepted that. If you look at a colonial settlement map, you'll quickly discover the Dutch, French, English and Swedes all had overlapping colonial claims. They then tended to sort these claims out via things like the French and Indian (or 7 Years) War.

I've done quite a bit of reading about this stone this week. It's been mishandled over the years to the point that im sure he probably can't date it. And that's just as good as dating it in his world im sure.

So secret that we let a famous conspiracy theorist examine its contents on a prime-time TV show.

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Rick

12/31/2014 01:36:18 pm

Funny the articles I read just mentioned it was rotated out of viewing as normal. Makes me wonder how much time SW is going to devote to stating a conspiracy to hide it and recap that conspiracy after every commercial over and over. I think I read that it was front center like in a entryway, before being moved to another area then whisked away to its secret location. Obviously they didn't think of how hard SW's resolve is to see this stone. I'm betting that he can't examine it. From what I've read everybody in that area for the last 200 years has screwed around with it. Like I said earlier, that's a win for Wolter in that its asserted age can't be disproven by anyone.

spookyparadigm

12/31/2014 05:02:40 am

Did he mention red mercury? Which is fascinating.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury

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EP

12/31/2014 05:45:18 am

It is amazing how much Cold War techno-woo stems from the West failing to realize (at all levels) just how backward the Soviet R&D really was and had always been.

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Manfred

12/31/2014 06:35:02 am

In several of the books I've read about the cold war they seemed to be very adept at spying and used that to help close the gap with the west. But ultimately it's as you say, we over estimated them consistantly in numbers and technology.

EP

12/31/2014 06:46:58 am

I don't know... Aside from early nuclear espionage, I can't think of any remarkable feats of techno-spying on the part of the Soviets...

They *were* extremely good at convincing people that they were way ahead of where they really were... Or at least make the possibility sufficiently worrisome...

Byron DeLear

12/31/2014 08:32:15 am

Often times a big part of any sale is convincing the customer that he or she really needs what's being sold.

LTFMGP

12/31/2014 04:44:11 pm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_crisis

Uncle Ron

12/31/2014 06:59:31 am

I truly feel sorry for Scott Wolter. I have come to believe that, at least in so far as his diffusionist ideas are concerned (as opposed to, for example, the Custer fiasco), he really believes what he says even when it is inconsistent. For whatever reason, he wants to believe an alternate view of history and so he is heavily invested in the meagre internal logic of his various hypotheses. It’s as if he's trying to build a jigsaw puzzle from parts of multiple puzzles; often, pieces have to be shaved a bit to make them seem to fit. Meanwhile the end product looks nothing like the picture on the lid of the box.

If he were a common huckster, as some of the other prominent fringe figures are, I doubt that he would be so angry and defensive. We are attacking something he must truly want to believe in, otherwise he would simple ignore us. And, of course, it doesn’t help that after Jason (rightly) points out some deficiency in his presentation every comment poster here piles on their own ridicule.

Having said all that, I do have to state that I think AU & AA and their ilk are truly dangerous and subversive. What is especially sad is that real history is already so fascinating, entertaining, and full of mystery (and conspiracies are, for the most part, so implausible).

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Rick

12/31/2014 07:30:52 am

I think Uncle Ron is on the right track. Like I said above I think he just feels like if he can outmaneuver the critics argumentatively. Then he can't be denied. Where if I were to do what he is doing I would be knee deep in scholarly journals and books looking for the information I need to back myself and my conclusions up. Forming a chain of sources that support each conclusion.

But like you said I think he truly believes.

And that is why his resolve is so rock hard! And he seems to want others to acknowledge its rock hardness. And sometimes he makes me uncomfortable in the way he forces his rock hard resolve on others.

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T

12/31/2014 07:44:37 am

I for one do not want the show cancelled. I understand the concerns about the message being sent and some people being misinformed, but I'd still rather have SW publicly being ridiculous and blowing his lid all over the internet. As well as our fun chats here :)

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Rick

12/31/2014 08:15:39 am

I don't want it cancelled either but I wonder how many pirate goose chases he will have in the next season? I don't think his rating can stand many more of those.

Take his Captain Kidd episode and then go watch the Myth Hunters episode about Captain Kidd. If SW had worked for Myth Hunters they could have made that one episode a week long mini series. I'm not saying the later is any more accurate but it has so much more information and after watching it, SW's episode pales in comparison. I just wanted to point out that im not saying MH is perfect or accurate just that it's a competing show and in this case of similar content for the most part and they seem to do it much better.

Shane Sullivan

12/31/2014 04:01:49 pm

"I don't want it cancelled either but I wonder how many pirate goose chases he will have in the next season?"

If Scott Wolter spent more time chasing pirate geese, I would watch his show.

Tim/1

12/31/2014 05:10:21 pm

If he gets another season I hope he ties in the yonaguni monument in a narrative about Asians moving to America when sea levels were lower. I want to see him in full scuba gear 80ft down with his sight glass and camera adapter examining the steps. Then surfacing and concluding that there is no way to deny its human made 10k years old and that the people who made it were the ones who quarried the stone and gave it to the Templars to carve the KRS, thus establishing a land claim and agreement that the western lands of the U.S. were Asiatic and their main interest was in building little versions of the Great Wall all over modern day California. While the Templars claimed the eastern lands with the ultimate goal of hiding its treasure hoard on Oak Island, which was a hell of a walk back from the KRS location, then to ultimately proceed to work on their One Woorld Government.

Perhaps I shouldn't be giving SW any ideas. Lol

EP

12/31/2014 07:48:47 am

No one should feel sorry for Scott Wolter. Period. He makes a living by actively propagating ignorance and irrationality and doesn't feel any qualms about associating with some of the most despicable individuals imaginable for the sake of self-promotion.

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T

12/31/2014 07:57:28 am

That's a feather in his cap!

Dave Lewis

12/31/2014 02:39:51 pm

For a minute there I thought you were talking about Obama!

EP

12/31/2014 03:41:53 pm

Tell me about it! I also heard he is a secret Muslim and married to a Pakistani man! :P

Shane Sullivan

12/31/2014 07:06:25 am

"David Hatcher Childress was on to talk about vimanas, Nan Madol, and Nazis, and even though it isn’t relevant I can’t help but note that Swagger misspoke and called Childress an “enema” before correcting it to “enigmatic.”"

Come on, Jason. You know EP and I don't approve of juvenile humor. =P

"The town, which does exist, used to be called Jackass Flats..."

How appropriate that Childress should bring it up!

"Contrary to his stance on Ancient Aliens, Childress now claims that UFOs are not alien spacecraft but rather human-made products of technology and physics."

The heavy metal band Iced Earth has a couple of albums--the "Something Wicked" saga--about humanity being an alien race that invaded earth about twelve thousand years ago (right around 9500 BC, so important in fringe theory), driving the natives to the brink of extinction. The natives ("setians") proceed to initiate a grand conspiracy that persists to this day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Wicked_Saga

Parts of it come uncomfortably close to Jan Van Helsing-style antisemitic UFO superfringe, but at least Jews are explicitly stated to be part of humanity, and not conspirators themselves.

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EP

12/31/2014 08:11:20 am

"Parts of it come uncomfortably close to Jan Van Helsing-style antisemitic UFO superfringe"

That's blowing things out of proportion. Jon Schaffer is just a run-of-the-mill American folk anti-establishmentarian. Of course, they are an at-risk group for sliding into anti-Semitism. But he sounds like he actually means it when he says things like: "Please know that I stand with all of you freedom fighters in spirit, regardless of what race you are, what language you speak, or which God you choose, or not choose, to worship."

His worst sins seem to be mild populistic anti-intellectualism and a kind of anti-internationalism that is connected to the standard banking/NWO commonplaces you often hear even from respected intellectuals.

Iced Earth makes me go "meh". Jan Van Helsing makes me go:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrzgRxNdzHk

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Shane Sullivan

12/31/2014 11:40:25 am

Schaffer himself doesn't strike me as remotely Nazi--like. Heck, for the better part of the two albums the conspiratorial setians are cast in a sympathetic light, which would be unexpected if they were surrogate Jews in unabashed antisemitic fantasy literature.

However, unless it's intended to be a subversion of said themes (and I don't think this one is), any story about a conquering race being tricked out of their prize by a socially manipulative minority is closer to that sort of literature than I'd prefer.

It's something I personally would avoid writing, anyway.

EP

12/31/2014 12:09:36 pm

That's really narrow-minded and chauvinistic of you :P

Clete

12/31/2014 07:43:06 am

Jason, you must have the patience of a saint to endure two hours of David Childress and Scott Wolter babbling on about their half-baked theories. I could only stand about twenty minutes of David Childress and thirty minutes of Scott Wolter. I can only hope that both Ancient Aliens and America Unearthed have run their course. The problem is that the History Channel will probably replace them with more crap.

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CHV

12/31/2014 10:31:43 am

“People will go to great lengths to protect their belief systems, which are really dogma, religious dogma. It’s not science.”

Once again, Wolter pegs himself with irony without even realizing it. Fringe history is almost entirely based on personal faith.

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T

12/31/2014 12:47:47 pm

This just in: SW's last blog post up to 17 comments....still. He's really provoking the masses!

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RLewis

1/1/2015 02:53:02 am

I see Gunn has found a new hangout. I'm sure he'll find less critical review on SW's blog.

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CFH

12/31/2014 04:14:54 pm

I couldnt remember his address so I looked up SW's site on Bing and he's right Jasons post about his fake Degree is #1. The #1 Search term is "SW Is a Fraud" & #4 "SW is an idiot" . Boy thats gotta hurt the self esteem!

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EP

12/31/2014 04:59:58 pm

Nah, it just keeps his resolve hard. Hardness >5.

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T

12/31/2014 08:39:56 pm

Rock Hard

lurkster

1/1/2015 08:48:26 am

Schoch and Wolter. Together. With an inevitable bandwagon jumping by Schoch's good buddy West. (/cringe)

I guess it's pointless to hope for a rare moment of rationality from Schoch, like he had with Hancock's underwater pyramid or Osmanagić's Bosnia pyramid, culminating in some deliciously amusing moment of discrediting one of Wolter's crazy claims.

But I'm gonna try and ponder how much fun that would be just to get the sound of Childress's voice from the posted clip of insanity out of my head.

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tm

1/1/2015 04:15:29 pm

In his most recent blog post Wolter appears to be using "." as a source of information about Jason.

Kind of speaks for itself. Again.

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Rick

1/1/2015 04:36:16 pm

I notice he said "the harder you try the farther behind you get."

It's like a game for him to always refer to something being hard. Like his rock hard resolve he mentioned earlier.

Perhaps we could all pull together and donate a better variety of adjectives and adverbs to Mr. Wolter. I'm sure I have a few I could do without. Really, there's nothing sadder than a predictable diatribe.

EP

1/2/2015 03:01:55 am

I'm worried he might just trademark them all ;)

The Other J.

1/1/2015 07:37:18 pm

For what it's worth, a Viking artifact seems to have been found on Baffin Island, Canada. This probably won't go unnoticed.